Fuck AI

Agentic is such a shitty fucking word to describe how this works that you can tell it was dreamed up by fucking business and marketing idiots.

All of the new "agentic" models talk to themselves and consider it "thinking". It's completely ridiculous. Of course they eat up a lot of tokens, they're fucking chattering with themselves.

There's no way to quantify the amount of "tokens" any given task will take because the "thinking" chatter is verbose and unpredictable as shit. You can send it in a question like "What is happening?" and it burns through a million tokens trying to describe why the latest bash command it tried to run is taking fucking forever because it didn't write the command correctly and it is permanently paused waiting for stdin.

Did they literally learn nothing from “The Mythical Man Month?” Geesh.

it’s now apparent that using AI is more expensive than hiring people, especially since it offers only limited productivity gains at the moment.

And there it is: the wakeup call. The sound of a bubble at least deflating a bit (probably more to come). But we all know it will take months or years for that realization to really sink in. Corporate leadership will mess around trying to cut costs while denying they made a bad call by falling for the hype.

Also, this isn't just hitting tech giants by the way. This is hitting everyone who jumped on the AI bandwagon. What were going to see is a frantic scramble in two directions:

1. hiring a subset of people back because the C-level now realizes they are under-staffed for purpose - emphasis on subset, because they will happily keep overloading those remaining as much as possible.

2. pivoting to open source in-house hosted models to cut costs, and initially struggling with all the janky tooling that will come with it. But even once the tooling has been improved to be somewhat usable, there will still be some initial frustration with these models. For all the problems with the bleeding edge ChatGPT and Claude models, in most cases they are more useable than the self-hosted ones, which lag by a couple of generations.

What I'm hoping to see is the push to rely on AI drop off sharply and a resurgence for online community collaboration and resources. They weren't perfect, but at least they keep one's critical thinking and research skills a little sharper.

I miss times where you copy pasted whatever you had to google and correct stack overflow link was first result so you copy pasted first answer back to your IDE and everything magically worked. Now it's tokenmaxxing, ai guide spec files, skill files, agentic development, copilot code reviews and trainings because you're doing things wrong, you need to be context engineer, vibe code engineer, prompt engineer to use AI efficiently but event if you do all of it you're still doing things wrong.

People who repeatedly make horrible decisions, with no sign of learning, should not be allowed to continue making decisions. All of these frothy pro-ai people need to go. Let them spend the rest of their days picking up litter or something useful.

Agentic really moved the needle on this. I mean, if your LLM is suffering from a limit, why not let another LLM watch it. While that's going on, why not let yet another orchestrating LLM watch all the LLMs and tell them what to do. It starts to get confusing fast so better use yaLLM (yet another LLM) to watch the whole circus.

I know some people at a company where they pushed AI hard. Told employees to use it as much as possible, we'll pay for the tokens, and people were running out of tokens in the first week and the company didnt want to pay for more so they had to wait for counters to reset.

Good, fucking crash and burn bastards!

tokenmaxxing

I'm doing my part. 👍